How and Why Behavioral Advertising Works - The BlueLithium Study
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“We set out to prove that behavioral targeting performed better than contextual, and we wanted to see if that was true across the board,” explained Dakota Sullivan, BlueLithium’s Chief Marketing Officer. “What we found was it’s more complicated than that, and it depends on the goal of the marketer.” Indeed, as you’ll see, it depends on the marketing category as well and probably some other factors too.
BlueLithum’s study looked at 400 million impressions served to users based on the sites they had visited. So web surfers who had previously visited entertainment sites saw entertainment-related ads at the next site they visited; visitors to travel sites saw travel-related ads at the next site; and so forth. BL Labs sifted out nine behavioral categories that had over 10 million impressions, and analyzed them for patterns across various contextual categories.
If you look at the overall numbers, they present a very strong case in favor of advertising out of context, particularly in the way that it’s done with behavioral targeting. Two metrics were measured and compared: the click-through rate (CTR) and the action-through rate (ATR), sometimes known as the conversion rate. Overall, the CTR was more than 100 percent higher for the ads that were shown out of context – that is, in a different content category than the ad itself. And the ATR was 19 percent higher than for ads shown in the same context.
Before you blow your entire online marketing budget on behavioral advertising, though, you need to know that some categories showed very significant deviations from these figures. Take the web surfers who were classified as engaging in “business and finance” behavior. Their CTR was more than 100 percent higher for ads shown in the SAME content category. Their ATR was also higher for ads shown in the same content category – 128 percent higher, to be exact.
The behavior of the web surfers in the “entertainment” category told a different story though. If you’re showing ads to them which are targeted to the same content category (as opposed to ads targeted out of context), you’ll see click-through rates that are 92 percent lower than ones shown out of context, and action-through rates that are 66 percent lower. It’s tempting to draw a connection to the focuses or attention spans of web surfers interested in different categories, but that oversimplifies the issue.
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